Twitter @haarsager

Monday, 31 July 2006

Marguerite Reardon has been having problems with her cable DVR -- DVRs, actually. She writes:

... In March, Cablevision announced plans to test a new digital video
recording service that allowed users to record and manage content
through their existing set-top boxes, which would access a
network-based DVR housed miles away in a Cablevision office. ¶ The network-based DVR could save Cablevision tons of money, because
company won't have to deploy and manage sophisticated devices in every
subscriber's home. And subscribers wouldn't have to deal with the
headache of boxes that reboot or fail altogether. But content owners
quickly responded with threats of legal action, citing concerns over
protecting copyright material. As a result, Cablevision put its test on
hold until the digital rights management issues can be worked out, the
company said. ...

Friday, 28 July 2006

Mark Schubin's frequent memo on digital television developments for July 26, 2006 has been posted to the OpenDTV list. Link: FreeLists. His lead story this week is TiVo starting a research division. The story quotes the New York Times, and I'll make a separate post on it. --Dennis

Tuesday, 11 July 2006

... Both Comcast and Time Warner Cable are working quickly to deal with the
reality of Web-based broadband content providers. Their solutions don't
go quite as far as one would ultimately predict, but the future path is
fairly obvious. Within a short period of time, people will be able to
watch content from the Internet in a convenient, emotionally
satisfying, "lean-backward" way. This is opposed to the "download it to
something, burn it to something or route it somewhere and watch it on
your computer at your desk (or on your TV if you've spent the time and
energy to set up a media center PC and an A/B switch)" mode. Sure you
can do it now, but most people can't. And, truth be told, even the
people who can won't bother very often; it's just too time-consuming. ...

Monday, 26 June 2006

Cable multisystem operators needn't fear the claims of IPTV dominance by telcos,
provided they are aggressive in rolling out their own switched digital video
plans, cable executives agreed at panels of the Society of Cable
Telecommunications Engineers here earlier this week. ¶ Richard Green, president and chief executive of cable consortium CableLabs,
said he sees only the Verizon FiOS topology as posing a true threat to hybrid
fiber-coax architectures. ¶ "HD channels are the ultimate weapon against IPTV, because most of the PON
architectures being talked about right now can't handle multiple HD streams,"
Green said. "Verizon is the toughest competitor because it duplicates the cable
plant." ...

Sunday, 25 June 2006

... The new party line says Google and Yahoo are cable's real competition in video, not Verizon and AT&T. Then there's the growing cadre of Internet video upstarts like Akimbo, YouTube, and DaveTV. ¶ The upstart crowd is doing a nice job of assembling "viral" and user-generated content. But distribution is limited to the PC screen, or in Akimbo's case, a proprietary IP set-top box. Couldn't they team with MSOs? ¶ Of course, cable MSOs can add value to these services by providing preferential QoS treatment for video streams. But what proves far more interesting is moving these "long tail" services into cable's video-on-demand (VOD) offerings. In this model, YouTube and friends would essentially become cable programming networks -- Homey Box Office if you will -- aggregating and filtering user-generated video content for on-demand broadcast to the TV. ...

Tuesday, 20 June 2006

FCC chairman Kevin Martin supports cable must carry for all DTV program streams. With the appointment of the new commissioner, Robert McDowell, he had scheduled it for tomorrow's (6/21) agenda. However, Drew Clark reports that McDowell apparently favors a voluntary solution and it's been pulled from that agenda. Read the story at National Journal. --Dennis